1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a system for migrating audio recordings, such as voice messages, greetings, name announcements, etc. as well as attribute information, from a source system to a destination system and, more particularly, to a system that does not require knowledge of the source system application programming interface (API) and which uses automated speech recognition (ASR) to help capture the audio recordings and to help navigate the source system.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are many different voicemail systems deployed in telecom networks—from many different suppliers. Some voicemail suppliers support subscriber migration—or the ability to migrate settings, greetings, announcements, messages, and other attributes—from one platform to another. However, typically the platforms have to be from the same manufacturer, and often have to be from the same product family and software release.
There have been numerous attempts to migrate subscribers from diverse manufacturers, but these have always required that the original manufacturer provide an application programming interface (API) into their platform so the subscribers could be moved. Naturally, few (if any) manufacturers have made this a priority for their system, because it increases the likelihood that they will lose a customer to a competitor.
There are now a sufficient number of voice mailboxes deployed for there to be a sizeable market for offering a subscriber migration system and service. This market opportunity, and advances in technology, have created a need to migrate voicemail subscribers from legacy or previous generation platforms to new platforms being deployed that offer greater features and functionality. Furthermore, because of the resistance noted above, a need exists for an approach to subscriber migration that does not require that the original manufacturer provide an API for determining the subscriber features and message content from the old system.
Suppliers of next generation messaging technologies have traditionally had a significant hurdle to deploy in established networks—the installed base. The most common strategy is to propose a “cap and grow” methodology to new deployments. Basically, the proposal is to install the new messaging technology alongside the original technology, but to provision all new subscribers on the new technology, and allow the subscribers to “churn off” the old technology. While this strategy is simple to implement, it is not practical from a carrier's point of view. It requires that the carrier have duplicate facilities from each end office to both the old and the new systems to provide service to all the subscribers. The duplicate facilities significantly increase the cost of the deployment of new messaging technology—to the point where it is no longer cost effective. What is needed is a subscriber migration service that removes this barrier. In addition, a service is needed that will allow the carrier to only move the facilities to the subscriber migration system, which will switch the call to either the original system or the new system based on whether or not the particular subscriber has been migrated from the original system or not. One approach for moving the subscribers off of the legacy platform is to provision new accounts for those subscribers on a new platform while still allowing them access to their messages from the old system for a limited time period. To listen to those messages, a subscriber could be transferred to the old system upon request, or the new system could use a back channel to retrieve the messages from the legacy platform. This approach requires the aforementioned duplicate facilities, plus educating the customers of the change and expiring their messages to remove the legacy platform at a later time. What is needed is a system that does not have such requirements.
The carriers may also want to migrate subscribers from one voicemail system to another because of load requirements. For example, a mail system may originally serve several different geographical areas and one area may grow faster than another. In such a situation, to reduce costs, the carrier may want to position a new voicemail system specifically for the high growth area. What is needed is a system that will allow migration in this situation.